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Canada

Even at this early hour, the deep, jewel-blue of evening is already fading to night’s darker hues beyond the buildings. Still in the city’s small heart, though, the sky glows and refracts between windows, brightened by the lights from inside, the street-lamps outside.

There is a quickening, an energy as commuters move away from the centre, a flow that pulls us all along for a block or two until the shift to calm that comes with the transition to neighbourhoods.

Then it is dark, night descends quickly, a blanket sprinkled with the twinkling of porch lights. The cold wind refreshes, blows nostalgia at me through a small park; the scent of fallen leaves.

This is home. It is familiar. Canadian.

I love this about where I live – the familiarity, the nostalgia, the ease of moving around here, of knowing what to expect, season after season.

And yet, the other half of my heart continues to tug me, as it always has, toward Ireland.

Just as religion in religious wars
lacks the appearance of education, of equality,
anomalies in life, like chastity
and the maps and charts of marriage
are the debunkers of relationships;
in our history, we dream freely of gardens,
of sexual freedom as pleasing to icons,
and of childhood as the ideal of humanity.

For NaPoWriMo day 12, a little index poem from the book currently residing on my bedside table, Champlain’s Dream, by David Hackett Fischer.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Ottawa War Memorial, source: eruditephotography.com

A gathering, milling crowd of expectation swells,
turns, waits, checks the time,
is blown silent by the November breeze.

In the distance,
the faint sound of trumpets, drums,
and then the marchers come;
crisp navy and gleaming black,
pristine white and tartaned,
poppy-adorned and medalioned.
All in unison they march,
come to attention,
then march on again to the drum beat
(heart beat)
with clacking heels and twirling, swirling kilts and crisp-pressed pants.
The thrilling trills of ancient bagpipes fill our ears,
fill the air, fill the spaces in between.
That deep-in-your-heart boom of the bass drum
cuts below and through the tunes as they pass
as they glow and flash –
red and white.

When the drums and pipes and footsteps cease
a lone bugle takes up the call,
guns fire and jets roar overhead –
a reminder –
as all eyes turn skyward.

Paper and Salt attempts to recreate and reinterpret dishes that iconic authors discuss in their letters, diaries and fiction. Part food and recipe blog, part historical discussion, part literary fangirl-ing.